As many in our office at Monterey Language Services—including our director—are alumni of the Middlebury Institute, we join the career fair every year to speak to promising students and other alumni who attend the event. Those involved ranged from conference interpreters to patent translators or localization project managers, and each one spoke with lots of enthusiasm and eagerness about their experiences and hopes for the future.

The career fair takes months of planning to invite and coordinate the attending companies. When the doors initially opened at 8:00AM for preparation, we were there to set up. As in years past when the event was live, we prioritized mobility with our booth—with our information placed on the table, we were free to walk around the booth and meet attendees at eye-level. One attendee mentioned that it made them feel much more at ease to speak with company employees while we were all standing, rather than speaking with company employees who were sitting.

Our booth was a roaring success. Between the official hours of the fair, 9:00AM-12:00PM, a never-ending multitude of people came to inquire about our positions. It was a treat to meet such friendly faces and discover talent from across the globe. We hope and know that regardless of the positions these students and alumni earn, they will achieve great careers.

We would like to thank not only the attendees, but also the staff at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies for making this event such a success. We know that many, including ourselves, were eager to come to the career fair in-person after such a long time away, and we think that it could not have been better. Thank you.

We’re very excited to return to the career fair for the first time in person since the start of the pandemic, and we’re even more excited to be able to see all of you!

Ahead of the career fair, we’d like to ask that any interested students sign up using our online form https://forms.gle/hoFssswUREPEHZUw7. This will help us to get to know you better ahead of the event, and will help make our meeting more productive.

We’ll also be collecting resumes, getting to know you, and describing our exciting positions for interpreters or as a Project/Office Assistant.

Stop by our booth, meet our wonderful team, and tell us more about yourself! Don’t forget to sign up ahead of time using the link https://forms.gle/hoFssswUREPEHZUw7. And don’t forget to ask your friends and fellow classmates: Have you signed up yet?

Understanding Your Finances

No business can do anything without finances. Do budget properly, and do the math to understand your bottom line. How much do you need to make to turn a profit? How much is too much for customers to afford?

Knowing when and where to cut back on your finances and where to invest is critical to keeping your business afloat. With the huge impact of the pandemic, it’s no question that the loss of sales affected many businesses too much. To weather these hardships, downsizing on your output, office space, or perhaps even prices might help you keep the business going.

Making and Keeping Connections, even Remotely

Many language service providers rely on freelance translators and interpreters as vendors for their business; most times, getting in touch with them is often done through phone calls or emails. But, how do you get the vendor—especially interpreters—to their assignments, when in-person meetings are restricted?

Phone and video methods are hardly secrets. Even outside of the pandemic, these are common ways to get an interpreter to someone immediately regardless of where the client and interpreter are. Those LSPs and other small businesses that had already been getting ready to use remote or online options were in a good place to adapt their services to the pandemic.

Communicating with Your Team

To keep open communication with your team members is vital. Just as upper management relies on associates to get the on-hands work done, associates rely on upper management to answer their questions. The back-and-forth dynamics and momentum are crucial to move your business forward.

In times of hardship like the pandemic, transparent communication is very important. Employees may be nervous about job security or keeping certain accounts going. Positive reinforcement, support, and leadership can provide teams with the confidence they need to weather any circumstance.

Don’t be Afraid of Change…

New technologies come out constantly in today’s world, even during the pandemic and afterward. Learning how to use them can help your business stay up-to-date, and can even help with your output’s quality and/or quantity.

Other changes might include the coming and going of staff, a vendor changing their prices, the laws you have to keep in mind, etc. Keep abreast of these changes and remember to stay flexible; taking too long to adapt might leave you in the dust of your competitors.

Adapting to pandemic looked different for all sorts of companies, but what’s important is to stay creative. Some businesses turned remote, others decided to automate work flows, and some decided to host online events.

…But Try to Stay Consistent

Sudden, unexplained changes even outside the pandemic can upset a person’s balance and leave them scrambling for an answer. For example, having to reduce the price per word for a translation could result in a vendor refusing to work with you, or raising the prices too high for a customer could result in the customer backing out of a deal.

As important as it is to stay flexible, people like to stick to tried and true methods—things remain reliable that way. So, whenever possible, keep consistent in your work, and be as transparent as possible with your customers. Consistency and transparency will always be appreciated by those you work with.

We are looking for an Office & Project Assistant to work in our Monterey location to support the operations of a dynamic Translation & Interpretation Service Provider. The position would involve general office administrative tasks, helping support our team members in other locations, and would evolve towards a marketing direction focused on web-, app-, and social media-based platforms.

The ideal candidate will be someone: forward-thinking, in tune with today’s trends, who enjoys explaining things; energetic, motivated, and passionate, with an interest in social media and mobile apps; capable of working independently, and with team members working from other locations; organized, detail-oriented, and possessing excellent English written and oral communication skills. Native speakers of English are preferred.

Pay begins at $15/hr and up, commensurate with experience; Full- and part-time applicants are welcome. This position provides golden opportunities to gain a general understanding of a translation business, and the effects of current trends, techniques, and activities in a real-world business environment.

If you are interested, please kindly respond to Mei-Ling at mei-ling@montereylanguages.com with a cover letter and resume.

Monterey Language Services is committed to bridging the world’s languages by providing quality, professional and efficient translation & interpretation services in over 175 languages. Please feel free to request a quote from us.

Monterey Language Services is offering a full-time project management position, to manage translation and interpretation projects in a large number of languages.

We are looking for a MATURE, ENERGETIC, SELF-MOTIVATED, AND RESPONSIBLE person with the following experience/requirements:

• At least one year of experience handling multilingual projects in the TRANSLATION & INTERPRETATION business
• Has a great sense of responsibility and passion about working as Project Manager
• Able to cooperate with others as well as work independently
• Good English communication skills – both written and verbal
• Experience using SDL Trados or similar as a Project Manager
• Experience using interpreter scheduling software is welcomed
• Likes working with technology and tools

If you are interested, please email your COVER LETTER, Resume and recent salary history to Mei-Ling Chen, Director of Translation, at mei-ling@montereylanguages.com

Monterey Language Services
www.montereylanguages.com

Our clients depend on us to get their translated texts to them by a certain agree-upon point, so that they can make their own deadlines. To our customers, we and our translators are just one part in a machine that needs everyone to be on time to run smoothly. If we – or any other part of that machine – fail to perform our part in a timely manner, the entire thing will grind to a halt. Time will be wasted, and time is money.

Missing a deadline by one day, or even just a few hours, can have extensive consequences for a business. For example, if the translation of a manual didn’t arrive in time to be sent to the client’s manufacturer, production would not start on time either. The manufacturer has their own schedule and deadlines, and the client’s order may end up being moved down the queue far more than just one day. The same thing could happen at the next step in process as well.

Compare it to making a connecting flight. If you’re ten minutes behind on the first leg of your journey, you don’t just arrive late, you might not arrive at all.

It is our goal to make sure we meet every deadline, to never put our clients in such a difficult situation.

So how do we do it? Our strict management process ensures that every step of the translation is completed on time and any delays are caught and dealt with quickly and efficiently. We follow up with our linguists by phone and email, so nothing is allowed to slip between the cracks.

We know how important making the deadline is to our clients, and we make sure to do our part in keeping their business machine running smoothly.

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.

Whatever the reason your business has for holding a conference in Silicon Valley, Monterey Languages Services is here to help.  We come from a conference interpretation background with an amazing network of alumni, graduates from the Graduate School of Translation and Interpetation of the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS), speaking many different languages, and equipped with the most advanced listening and presentation technologies.  We hold ourselves to the industry’s highest standard, and have contributed to the success of many international conferences for our Silicon Valley clients.

Before every conference interpretation event starts, we make preparations in advance. From selecting a team of conference interpreters, putting together interpretation equipment & the audio and video system, setting up interpreter rooms or interpreter booths, to studying the conference materials in advance, there is a design and a goal in mind in order to achieve the best result in an event we are entrusted to provide conference interpretation.

When the audience gets there, each member is provided a headset connected to a radio-like device that receives the channels of interpretation in different languages (English, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, etc.). Use push to talk microphones to ask questions.  With all of these high-tech equipments, we come on site to provide technical support and make sure customers are enjoying using modern technology to help them break the language barriers.

At the end of the event, every audience member has clearly understood the conference. They were enthusiastic about it, and good business deals are about to come out of this.

The Monterey Language Services team feels—hey, Silicon Valley–mission accomplished.

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.

To assure this, we have developed a rigorous management process, starting with choosing the best translators from our translator database. We always select translators with the subject matter knowledge and experience necessary for the project at hand, using translators who specialize in marketing for marketing translations, medical translators for medical translations, legal translators for legal translations, and technical translators for technical translations.

Using translators unsuited to the subject matter leads to mistakes, and it is the most common problem in translation projects. That is why selecting the right translators is a fundamentally important step in our process.

We don’t rely on just a handful of translators. We have a huge database and network of linguists, many of them accredited and certified, and we are continually expanding it, always looking for the best translation professionals in their fields. We start by screening our translators and testing them to make sure they are able to perform to our standards. We also build and maintain a professional working relationship with them, to make sure they understand our standards and our clients’ needs.

Even after the translation is complete, we further review our translators’ work to make sure they meet our quality requirements. We find, isolate, verify and resolve any issues. With the multi-stage quality assurance process, which uses at least two linguists for every translation, followed by an extra round of QA and Verification, we ensure that no mistakes slip past us into the final product.

Doing the job right the first time is utterly important. It saves time and avoids extra cost. Best yet, it helps our clients increase communication success and business growth. This is our mission every day and we are loving it!

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.

For translation and interpretation projects, why do customers prefer to hire a translation company like Monterey Language Services instead of an individual translator or interpreter?

The short answer is a company like ours has a system and resources in place to guarantee quality and availability.  In other words, we provide professional translation and interpretation services.

We make sure all our customers are confident that their projects are being handled by experts and their requests will be met with the highest possible quality. We are our customers’ external team, helping them move forward to the growth of their core business.

Whether it is a request for a Chinese interpreter for two hour or a couple of Spanish interpreters and Portuguese interpreters for two days; a one-page press release to be translated in eighteen languages, or a thirty page manual to be translated into Spanish, French, German, and Japanese, we take care of them all.  That is our everyday life.

First, we recruit highly skilled translators and interpreters every single day – find the best translators and interpreters with the right language pair and expert background knowledge, and test them. Then, we train them according to the customer’s guidelines. We coordinate them and brief them with all the necessary information, so they become a part of the company we serve.  

We also decide on how many linguists to deploy to assure quality in every aspect and provide backup translators and interpreters if one becomes unavailable. We provide all languages assistance in order to meet our customers’ needs for comprehensive and full line services.  Once a customer finds Monterey Language Services, they don’t need to go anywhere else.  We tailor solutions to our customers’ specific needs.

Last but not least, often times, a translation project, a conference interpretation event, or a voiceover/subtitling project requires a team effort.  Projects are usually supported by a group of professionals rather than a single-handed individual effort.   It could involve so many aspects that only an experienced and professional company like Monterey Language Services can excel in it.

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.

You have found us – we provide quick & easy solutions for all your translation needs. Tell us about the subject of the text to be translated, its size and the languages you want, and we will provide a quote. Send us the files, and within short order, we will deliver a clear, accurate, complete translation.

That’s it! That’s all you have to do. Simply send us the text you want translated, then leave all the rest to us.

Of course, quite a bit more goes on behind the scenes, starting with doing the translation right the first time. We use a multi-step process to ensure the quality of our translations, starting with the translation itself, then editing, followed by proofreading and QA. Every translation is confirmed by at least one other linguist to assure that the meaning of the original is conveyed clearly and accurately. 

We also check for completeness and formatting and can perform DTP image editing as necessary. We work with any format, from Word documents, to PowerPoint presentations, to Excel spreadsheets, to software applications, to website localization. Whether you’re looking to translate a code of conduct, an employee handbook, company policies, a slideshow, a survey or a script, we can make it happen.

We can also handle any subject matter. Whether legal documents, technical manuals, or medical reports, our highly-trained translators will rise to the challenge. Our specialization is in highly-technical subjects.

Furthermore, we provide over 175 languages (including Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, Malay, German, French, Indonesian, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Russian and more).

We treat every project with special care, and our goal is to always try our best to make sure the readers understand the original text in their own language, as clearly and as easily as possible. 

Monterey Language Services strives to provide the highest quality of translation and interpretation services. Please feel free to contact us for a quote.